Obama: South Africans' freedom fight inspirational

August 24, 2006|By FROM NEWS SERVICES

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Sen. Barack Obama, the only African-American in the U.S. Senate, paid tribute Wednesday to South Africans' fight for freedom, saying they helped inspire his own political career.

With handshakes, hugs and his congenial grin, the Illinois Democrat toured Soweto, the township where white rulers once tried to confine by night the blacks who worked in their homes, offices and mines by day.

Obama arrived in South Africa on Sunday, the first stop on a sentimental tour of the continent of his late father--a goat herder who went on to become a Harvard-educated government economist for his native Kenya.

The senator also will visit his father's village in Kenya and travel to Djibouti and Chad on a trip he hopes will bring new light to Africa's importance.

Aides said Wednesday that Obama had scrapped plans to visit Congo and Rwanda at the request of the U.S. Embassy in Congo because of postelection fighting in that country's capital, Kinshasa.

Obama began his tour Sunday with a visit to Nelson Mandela's former prison at Robben Island. He has met with black businessmen, AIDS victims and U.S. Embassy officials, among others.

His visit to South Africa coincided with one by Oprah Winfrey, who was there to interview candidates for her Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls-South Africa, which is opening in January 2007.

At the Hector Pieterson Museum, built on the site where peaceful child protesters were gunned down by police 30 years ago in an attack that awakened the world to the brutality of the apartheid regime, Obama said he became involved in politics to fight for divestment of U.S. interests in South Africa to protest apartheid.

"If it wasn't for some of the activities that happened here, I might not be involved in politics and might not be doing what I am doing in the United States," he said.